Blizzard

Welcome to another Artcraft! I’m Chris Robinson, art director on WoW, and today we’re keeping it short and sweet with a reveal of the updated male Human model. As with the previous model redesigns, our goal here was to honor the silhouette and style of the original, while increasing fidelity and fixing some of the big issues we’d identified. The male Human has long been a source of criticism from some of you for his odd proportions and face geometry. We’ve taken great care to ensure we’re not changing so much that he looks completely unlike anything you’d expect, while also correcting some of the more glaring problems. We hope you enjoy the results!

On a slightly separate topic: I wanted to give you a quick heads up that we’re expecting some in-progress models to be hitting the Warlords of Draenor alpha test soon. While these will give you an early look at some of the models, please be aware that they aren’t finished yet. We’ll be presenting final high-quality model captures in future Artcrafts, so stay tuned!

These guides also cover what's new, changed, and removed for all spells from Talents to Perks. We've condensed confusing formulas, reworded verbose tooltips, and color-coded what's being added and removed to make it easier to follow along. We've even included Patch Notes for an official explanation of the changes, as well as all blue tweets made by Blizzard devs on a class' spell changes.

A new Warlords of Draenor Alpha build is on its way. For a complete list of our past Warlords of Draenor coverage including class guides, Frostfire Ridge rare spawns, and Garrison tools, check out our WoD Content Hub.

11pm EST: NPCs, Quests, Druid Tier 17, and more items added to our Warlords database!10pm EST: VIdeo of new Mythic Tier sets and list of Warlords PvP set bonuses added!A new build is coming to the Warlords of Draenor Alpha! To learn more about the Alpha, check out our Warlords of Draenor Coverage hub.

Technical Game Designer Celestalon also tweeted the following this afternoon:

Followed by Holinka's addition:

Patch Highlights

New abilities for Garrison followers, including ones that reduce the travel time of missions.

New Elekk Plushie battle pet. According to TheCrafticus, this pet acts like a regular stuffed animal and just stares at you when summoned, and then takes a beating in combat. He also tweeted a picture of this pet, shown to the right. Elekk Plushie may be a pet from tailoring.

Inscription was updated so that all glyphs will come from non-cooldown research spells in 6.0. A full list of these spells can be found here

New Darkmoon Joker cards like Moon Joker. According to TheCrafticus, you can trade a joker for any card in the set. They are rarely made when creating a Darkmoon tarot.

While the tooltips appear to imply that you no longer have to be an engineer to use Tinkers, Jonathan LeCraft has clarified that you still have to be an Engineer. The necessity is now implied rather than stated.

New 3D armor sets for Mage, Monk, and Shaman Mythic!

New "Scenarios" have been introduced to provide guidance in old dungeons. You can see more information below.

Over the past few months, we've found tons of new weapon models coming in Warlords of Draenor. We posted our latest weapons video on Friday, but we also thought it would be useful to see a list of all known WoD weapons, organized by source and type--so we made a blog for just that!

Of particular note:

Models have been datamined for Challenge Mode weapons--these models are very elaborate, and seem to be the WoD equivalent of Challenge Mode Gold armor sets in Mists of Pandaria.

Models marked as "crafted" appear to be faction themed and come in several tiers--the most elaborate weapons correspond to higher-quality stats.

Many Warlords Season 1 weapons have models attached, but we've also found models for "draenor honor" which imply that Honor weapons will look completely different in WoD, instead of being recolored Conquest weapons.

Be sure to click on the images to open up our 3D modelviewer, which allows you to preview the weapons on any race! To learn more about Wowhead's modelviewer, give our tutorial a read.

It's time for another Warlords of Draenor build update! The latest Warlords of Draenor patch notes included some major changes to Balance Druids that are reflected in today's data. As usual, take all datamining with a grain of salt and refer to patch notes for the list of official changes.

Patch Highlights

There's a special achievement for getting Warlock green fire at level 90:

Vanity items are now categorized as toys and we have a preliminary list of what will be in the toybox. We've listed the items below and organized them by type! Learn more about the toybox here.

The Encounter Journal is now twice as large for Warlords!

There is a new section in the build, called Character Upgrade Tier which includes things like Basic Combat Mechanics, Advanced Combat Mechanics, Control Mechanics, Cooldown and Area Spells, Abilities Fully Unlocked. This is likely to relate to the zone we've heard about as a place for new level 90s to have a DK-esque start zone, so that new level 90s or a returning players to not be overwhelmed by picking up all their abilities and mechanics at once.

As part of the latest build of Warlords of Draenor, we've put together a summary of the weapons and NPCs from the data, organised by source and type accordingly. As ever, clicking on any of the images brings up a modelviewer window, allowing you to inspect the weapons and NPCs from all angles. We've also put together a short video highlighting some of our favorite animated weapons from the latest build.

The 5.4.8 PTR was updated to the recent datamined build this afternoon, so Olivia and I checked out what was new! The new mounts were not seen on the PTR, although we do have 3D models below of them. But we were able to experiment with the new Heart of the Valorous buff and determined that it was automatically given to all players across PTR realms and stacked additively with Valor of the Ancients--great for alts!

Edited to Add: Logging in to the PTR today, the zone-wide buff has been removed. We're now not sure how it's attained, but we'll let you know when we find out!

The PTR is now live and Heart of the Valorous appears to be a patch-wide buff to all players, granting 100% additional valor! All we did to get the buff was log in to the PTR.

Deeds of Valor was also on the Timeless Coin vendor, with no Shaohao or other reputation required to obtain it. A brand new character can purchase it with coins.

And what's more, the Heart of the Valorous buff means that your Deed of Valor will actually award 200 Valor in return for your 3000 Timeless Coins.

It also appears to work alongside the Valor of the Ancients buff, as a 5 VP daily awarded us 12VP once capped -- 50% more being an extra 2.5 and 100% more being an extra 5. Both buffs seem to apply to the original 5 VP reward.

What's more, our testing indicates that Heart of the Valorous and Valor of the Ancients both work across factions and realms. This means that completing Empowering the Hourglass will award a huge 500 Valor Points with both buffs active -- 200 from the base reward, 200 from Heart of the Valorous and 100 from Valor of the Ancients.